Marxism is GREEN! Part 1

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...ist-manifesto/


A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois
society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property,
a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the
powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For
many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the
history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern
conditions of production, against the property relations that are the
conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is
enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical
return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial,
each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of
the existing products, but also of the previously created productive
forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out
an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity
-- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put
back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a
universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of
subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why?
Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence,
too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the
disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the
conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too
powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon
as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of
bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The
conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth
created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises?
One the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive
forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more
thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the
way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing
the means whereby crises are prevented.